| World
on film
by MARK SLUTSKY Every year, the Dutch-based World Press Photo organization assembles what it considers to be the best in documentary photography from all over the world. This year, the award’s news categories contained no shortage of striking, horrible imagery: people falling from the World Trade Center, soldiers clashing in Afghanistan, a dead protester in Genoa. But perhaps the most affecting
image, and the one that claimed the top prize for 2001, was a subtle
and almost abstract photo, “The Body of an Afghan Refugee Boy
is Prepared for Burial, Pakistan, June,” taken by Danish photographer
Erik Refner. There’s no violence in the picture; it’s a
calm and almost peaceful representation of the effects of violence and
hunger. In a Pakistani refugee camp, a tiny child lies on a white sheet
as three pairs of wizened hands tend to an Afghan ritual, performed
by males, that readies the body for burial. You might be surprised to learn, though, that the photo was taken last June, months before September 11 and the subsequent invasion of Afghanistan and media coverage thereof. It was early last summer when Refner, a freelance photojournalist, heard the news that, according to him, “Refugees were coming to Pakistan, because of the worst drought in 30 years and new fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. So there was a huge problem in Pakistan. The UN couldn’t help because Pakistan labelled them as economic refugees, not ‘real’ refugees. There was a big vacuum there—there were all these people and no help. At that time there was no media at all reporting from that place… it was something that wasn’t very present in the news at all.” Refner, working for Copenhagen newspaper Berlingske Tidende, made his way to Pakistan and stayed in the camp for two weeks, shooting photos and writing his story. “At that time it was very bad—it was 55 degrees out at that moment,” he says. “One of the only relief organizations there was Doctors Without Borders, doing tremendous work at the camp, but otherwise there was very little help. It was very terrible.” It was in the midst of this that Refner shot the picture of the child, so unusually framed, with its almost bird’s-eye angle. “I went up to the camp because I got some information that the child had just died,” he says. “I paid my condolences to the father and after a little while I asked him if it was okay with him if I took pictures of when they were preparing [the child], and he accepted. I went inside the little tent where they were sitting on the floor, with the little child lying on the ground. I was there taking the picture and trying not to interfere with their grief, or to interfere with anything.” Later, Refner would follow the family out to the graveyard and pray along with them “as well as I could—I’m not a Moslem, but I tried.” (By the way, don’t let this give you the impression that Refner only focuses on stuff this heavy. Next year he’s got a photo book on Swedish rockabilly culture coming out—he spent some months hanging out with rockabilly types and, he says, “I even got a haircut like them.”) Hot shots On the charming side you’ve got Aleksander Nordahl’s photo, “Three Sisters, Khwaja Bahawudin, Afghanistan,” which portrays a trio of rather shy and amused Afghan sisters; one grins at the camera, and the two others peep out from opposite sides of a doorway. The visible girl, at seven years old, is permitted to show her face, while the others, teenagers, have already donned veils. “Three Sisters” is the winner of the Children’s Jury award, which is voted on by a group of 11 and 12 year olds from a pool of about 400 entries. Or take one of the winners from the Arts category, “Senegalese Haute Couture.” Taken by the single-monickered Italian shutterbug Shobha, the photo features two Senegalese men in colourful dress, each perched on a pair of stilts that elevates their torsos just above the single-story building next to which they’re standing. Some of the pictures are fascinating in that the images seem to pose little visual riddles. American John Costello’s photo, “Corrective Surgery: Computerized Hand,” is dominated by a weathered and shrivelled-looking hand with a thin white wire extending from it down to the lower right-hand corner of the frame. There, another pair of hands, clad in bloody surgical gloves, work on something vaguely robotic looking. The title of the photo more or less explains what’s going on, but on its own as an image, it’s beautifully abstract. Olivier Grunewald’s “Space Meteorology: The Northern Lights” is similarly sci-fi. A large metal apparatus, most likely a giant radar dish of some kind, sits in a snowy field, seemingly assaulted and overwhelmed by the blue-green light show in the sky. Of course a lot of the pictures in the exhibition do make you worry for the world. Jan Grarup’s picture, “The Boys From Ramallah,” features a convoy of children in military garb, some carrying machine guns. This is a depressing picture. And it’s even more so if you think of it as a complement to Refner’s photo. Being able to see these images from all over together and make some inference about the world is why exhibits like this have such impact. : World Press Photo 2001 shows at the Maison de la culture Plateau Mont-Royal (465 Mont-Royal E.) through Sept. 29: >> A gaggle of gallery goings-on >> Arts Listings |
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Communications Gratte-Ciel Ltée 2002 |
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